Marc Badia at L21 Gallery, Barcelona

Marc Badia (1984, Barcelona) explores the relationship between history, contemporary culture and dystopia. The artist creates a dynamic dialogue between destruction and creation, redefining elements of the past in a new context through the absurd. In some way, the past and the present are connected through a kind of visual archaeology that can even lead to dystopia.

His work poses a fascinating question: what happens when multiple versions of the past and the present coexist, in an almost multiversal sense, within the same piece or space? In this sense, and taking up another central influence in his work, Badia turns the tradition of painting into fertile ground for sampling, where, as in hip hop music, references from other authors are mixed with his own to generate unexpected meanings. In fact, the very title of the exhibition, “Son buenas tardes si nadie dice gilipolleces” (It’s a good afternoon if nobody says bullshit) is a sentence by the Spanish rapper Juaninacka. For Badia, the very idea of ​​culture comes from this constant, self-referential sampling.

For this exhibition, the artist also took inspiration from the cabinets of curiosities, Renaissance spaces and paintings where unique, exotic, and often unconnected objects were displayed. One example is the “The Five Senses” series that was born from the collaboration between painters Brueghel and Rubens. Made in the early 17th century, they represented the five senses through scenes crowded with objects, animals, and people. Picking up on this idea, Badia employs a visual density in his compositions, where each element contributes to a narrative complexity.

However, while Flemish painters celebrated the power of the senses through an abundance of detail and technical virtuosity, Badia introduces a contemporary layer of redefinition. In his paintings, objects and symbols are juxtaposed with fragments of pop culture. This is where the notion of multiverse emerges: the images do not only correspond to a single chronology or cultural dimension but converge from different artistic “realities.”

As a final reflection, or rather as a starting point, the artist incorporates the notion of ruin, both physical and symbolic, throughout his creative process. His painting reflects a fascination with the ephemeral and destruction, while also considering whether culture itself could also fall into the category of ruin.

In addition to the works created specifically for this exhibition, we can see the video “Breve galimatías”, made by the artist in 2010 in the form of rotoscoping, and which expands the sampling process to the audiovisual field. From a series of four television fragments, Badia subtracts the images and transfers them to an animation to which he adds music and sounds. The exhibition room also incorporates everyday objects, as well as other older works so that the visitor can fully enter this meta universe and discover what is hidden or replicated in each work.